Art East Central is an English-language, open access, peer reviewed international journal publishing articles on architecture, design and the visual arts in central Europe from 1800 to the present day.
The common thread tying together the articles in this issue of the journal is the question of narrative and interpretation. Each of them deals with a different topic, from folk art to performance art in the 1970s, but they all deal with questions about the kinds of narratives and interpretations that have been deployed by art historians in relation to their respective topics.
During and after state socialism, issues of identity and ideology, as well as stratified meaning and criticism of culture in Central and Eastern Europe, were thoroughly explored in performance artworks. Despite extensive historizations and theorisations of regional practices, no research has focused on how the related body of ephemera was shaped through interpretation, exhibition, criticism, and academic work. The essay argues that the building of narratives in Central and Eastern European performance art was the duty of intellectuals and networkers, that we call guardians. Therefore, through exploring narrative shifts of performance art, the essay examines the role of guardians in the processes of shaping interpretations, discourses, and canonical understandings, while actively engaging in creative practice. Tracing historical encounters of performance as theory and artistic practice, the focus is on the creative and discursive processes of knowledge formation with examples from Czechoslovakia and Hungary. With the help of the case studies, the essay outlines a research method, which combines performative creativity and interrelationality and, therefore, can open up ways of discovering multiple perspectives, hegemonies, and fluidity of narratives, while addressing how historical knowledge has been created and (per)formed in and outside of Central and Eastern Europe.
Vratislav Effenberger is remembered primarily as the heir to Karel Teige from the 1950s and, as such, the leading representative of Surrealism in post-war Czechoslovakia. The editor of Teige's collected writings, as well as of anthologies of Surrealist texts, he wrote numerous articles on contemporary art and culture, with a focus on the legacy of relevance of Surrealism in the 1950s and 1960s. This text consists of a translation of a chapter from his only book-length theoretical study, Reality and the Poetic (1969), in which he offered an interpretation of the history of the avant-garde as well as a theoretical elaboration of avant-garde aesthetics. The translated chapter is prefaced with an introduction that provides a historical and intellectual background to Effenberger's work, including discussion of his marginalization by the socialist authorities as well as emphasis on key concepts in his work.
A significant conference Ukrainian art theory and history at the crossroads of intellectual traditions took place at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv on March 14 and 15, 2024, jointly organized by the Department of Art History at the University and the NGO Centre for Historiography and Theory of Art. This event commemorated the centenary of the death of Hryhorii Pavlutskyi (1861–1924), who held the distinction of being the first professor of art theory and history at the Imperial University of St. Vladimir in Kyiv. The conference considered Pavlutskyi’s role as an art historian and theorist and examined the major directions and trends in Ukrainian art theory and history from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, as well as the current state of art history and theory in Ukraine. This paper assesses the significance of Pavlutskyi as an art historian, and also as one of the important actors in the history of Ukraine in the early 1920s. It then focuses on three main themes of the reviewed conference: (1) intellectual exchange; (2) the influence of various political ideologies on Ukrainian art historical writing and (3) the juxtaposition of art history and the Ukrainian concept of mystetstvoznavsto (art scholarship) as two different disciplines.
The processes of modernization in Europe led, in the early twentieth century, to an increasing degree of interest in the status of folk art. If it represented a superseded stage of social and cultural development, what role did it have in modern society? The four texts here illustrate the different kinds of ideas that circulated in Czechoslovakia the interwar period, and they testify to the fact that it remained a continuing subject of fascination. The authors, ranging from the Russian art critic Sergei Makovsky to Karel Teige, one of the leading members of the Czechoslovak avant-garde, deal with a range of issues, to do with the nature creativity in folk art, the role of women as makers, the relation between folk and high art, and the commodification of folk art in modern urban life. The texts are prefaced with an introduction that outlines the broader context of debate in which these texts belong.
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The common thread tying together the articles in this issue of the journal is the question of narrative and interpretation. Each of them deals with a different topic, from folk art to performance art in the 1970s, but they all deal with questions about the kinds of narratives and interpretations that have been deployed by art historians in relation to their respective topics.
